Dorm Neighbor Testifies in Rutgers Webcam-Spying Trial

Molly Wei testifies for the second day at the trial for Dharun Ravi on Tuesday.

The trial of former Rutgers University studentDharun Ravi, accused of spying on his roommate with a webcam, continued Tuesday in Middlesex County Superior Court with more testimony from dorm neighbor Molly Wei.

Wei, who lived across the hall from Ravi and roommate Tyler Clementi, testified that she and Ravi had watched streamed images of Clementi kissing another man. A few days after the September 2010 incident, Clementi killed himself.

Her second day of testimony Tuesday is part of the the bias intimidation and invasion of privacy trial against Ravi, in which she has agreed with prosecutors to a plea deal.

The man with whom Clementi shared a dorm room tryst is expected to take the stand, possibly as early as Wednesday. So far, he has only been publicly identified by initials “M.B.”

In her testimony Tuesday, Wei also recounted being questioned by police following Clementi death. ”At the end of the conversation, the police officers told me that Tyler was missing and that he had possibly committed suicide,” she said. “I was overwhelmed, very sad and I felt very bad if anything had happened.”

Associated Press

Dharun Ravi listens to testimony during his trial at the Middlesex County Courthouse in New Brunswick on Tuesday.

On Monday, she had said she and Ravi initially agreed not to tell anyone about the first time they saw the footage.

“First of all, it was shocking. It felt wrong. We didn’t expect to see that. And now that what we did, it was like we shouldn’t have seen it,” Wei said. “We didn’t want people to know what had happened.”

But she and Ravi soon told others about it, Wei said — and she agreed to show other students.

Wei also testified Monday that one day after Clementi disappeared she traded text messages with Ravi about what they had said to police. Ravi reportedly asked her whether she had told the police they had intentionally viewed Clementi through the webcam, and she told him she had. He wrote back that he had told police they were only “messing around with the camera.”

A New Yorker article earlier this month by Ian Parker detailed how many of the early assumptions in the case that fueled national headlines about cyber-bullying were later revealed to be more complicated. Parker wrote:

Clementi’s death became an international news story, fusing parental anxieties about the hidden worlds of teen-age computing, teen-age sex, and teen-age unkindness …. It became widely understood that a closeted student at Rutgers had committed suicide after video of him having sex with a man was secretly shot and posted online. In fact, there was no posting, no observed sex, and no closet.